Lowest ever sea ice in Arctic

As the risk of boring everyone including myself, "WAKE UP AMERICA wake up."

It's the begining of the end.

Its amazing how important this is but so many people arent even paying attention to it. this has got to be linked to these huge hurricanes and floods somehow, lots of people go around thinking its just the worlds bad luck or something. This is the biggest concern to be dealt with in this day and age!!!!!

And Republicans still argue with the science. My parents still, to this day, duke it out with me on the subject of "global warming" - I still call it its throwback name. "Climate Change" was a spinster's (GOP) doing b/c it sounded less scary.

The problem is that there isn't enough data. We have absolutely NO IDEA what the polar ice looked like even 100 years ago. It's the same thing with hurricanes. We had no satellite data before the 1960s. You guys want us to take on faith that all of this stuff just moves on a linear progression. You can't make those assumptions. No scientist worth his salt would. Now . . . a political activist might . . . but a scientist . . . NO.

we might check in a little early before the 2012 due date...

jawnybnsc

So you just sit back idly, cross your fingers and, what?, pray for the best? This is the part of the argument I don't understand. You can muddy up any data, distort ANY argument, when properly motivated. I mean, really, do YOU think this is all coincidence, that this is the circle of life Simba, and we should all just carry on about our daily business when certain signs - however preliminary - show something's off kilter?!? Give me a break.

well i was watching an episode of glen becks show a while ago, and he had a segment on global warming. a bunch of the worlds top scientists got together for a convention in NYC a little while back, and the topic was global warming. they concluded that whats going on right now is part of a natural cycle in the earth's process. the media didn't even cover this convention because obviously they only report what they want you to see/hear. basically, the earth goes through periods of extreme cold and extreme heat, and everywhere in between. im not saying we arent affecting this planet with the burning of fossil fuels, but i am saying that it is not as bad as it is made out to be. not YET. also, in response to jawny, there are other ways to get past hurricane data without using sattelites. national geographic came out with a show showing how there are people who dedicate their lives to "reading" the rings of trees. by doing so, they can tell periods of extreme weather and what was going on during a specific period of time. these people also took a large 4 or 5 foot long 6 inch wide section of muck out from the bottom of some lake and by comparing certain types of sediment in the stratified layers were able to accurately document past hurricane seasons back almost 1500 years. and the results were that there is in fact a pattern of severe storms and then it slows down, only to speed up again. it explains it a lot better maybe you can research it but it was really cool. also, scientific data shows that the antarctic ice cap is the largest its been in recorded history.

The problem with the natural cycle argument is that it does not account for mediation of the additional CO2 we are putting into the atmosphere. Also, all "natural" climate change has some forcing agent. It doesn't just happen.

But more importantly, wherever you stand on this issue, there are many reasons beyond climate change that should inspire us to move away from carbon based fuels as quickly as possible. There are many other evironmental and health consequences as well as long-term economic consequences of carbon-based fuels.

Let's not repeat the ethanol debacle.

So we should drill in even more oil wells and promote more oil usage for what reasons again? Grow up America and stop being so selfish.

It saddens me to see those poor polar bears wandering around on the melty ice.

=0(

Renewable energy is the fucking answer!!!!!! Why cant some people realize that is the thing that would solve all this. if it wasnt and we did it anyway, then the world deserves to get drowned.

"Declining ice thickness and what is looking like the second lowest coverage on record means that Arctic sea ice may well have reached its lowest levels ever in terms of total volume. "

Whoever wrote this article should have been more careful with their choice of words. We are not even close to the 'lowest levels ever' of ice volume. There have been many times in the paleoclimatic record when there was absolutely no ice on the Earth, and tropical plants and animals dominated the polar regions.

What they should have emphasized was the fact that the changes that the arctic regions are undergoing are irregularly abrupt, and the climate is changing faster than is has in 10,000 years. That is what we should be worrying about.

This issue is as important as any wall street calamity! Our country might be having financial woes (inflicted by greed of NeoCons and the incompetence of Bush) yet if we do not attend to GLOBAL WARMING AND EMISSIONS there will not be the world any of us care to live in.